How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark Page 8
Right-wing MPs argued that the burqa went against Danish values. Muslims argued that you could probably count the number of Danish burqa-wearers on your hand, and that this was therefore just another attempt to tar a whole minority with the brush of fundamentalism. In fact, more generally, Muslims are frustrated at being lumped into one homogenous group – something this chapter is itself guilty of. Unlike the Muslim community in, say, Germany, which is predominantly Turkish, Danish Muslims come from a very wide range of countries, which in turn sometimes makes solidarity between the different factions difficult.
Through the decade, the buzzword “integration” was constantly used. A Ministry for Integration was established – and you still hear the word all the time. Its meaning changes depending on the context. Sometimes people ask: how can we better integrate different groups of immigrants and Danes? But then there’s a more frustrated question: why won’t foreigners integrate? The first example sounds vaguely inclusive, but the second is slightly oppressive. Literally, the word implies some kind of mutual effort on the part of both Danes and newcomers. But often it is simply used to mean one-way assimilation.
The role the DFP played in the creation of these ideas and policies showed how far to the right the Danish immigration debate had shifted. Back in the 80s, the likes of Søren Krarup were ridiculed by those from the centre-right. After Krarup ran a large newspaper advert asking Danes to stop giving money to refugees – “No, not a single krone” – the prime minister, Venstre’s Poul Hartling, called him fanatical and hysterical. Other Venstre politicians responded by personally collecting money on the streets. When the DFP was founded a decade later – following a split from the far-right Progress Party in 1995 – it was ridiculed by those from the left and the centre-right alike. The Conservative leader Hans Engell said he doubted the DFP would ever form the basis of a coalition government. In 1999, the Social Democrat prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen told DFP politicians that “no matter how hard you try, you will never be decent.”
But times change. In the 2001 election, the DFP won 12% of the vote, becoming Denmark’s third-largest parliamentary party – a position they’ve held ever since. As a result, they entered into a loose alliance with the same centre-right parties – Venstre and the Conservatives – that had tried to distance themselves from the DFP during the previous decade. And as the documentary Ordet Fanger shows, Venstre’s new prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen started mimicking – to a word – the reactionary language Pia Kjaersgaard (the one-time DFP leader) had been using ten years earlier. “Denmark can’t be the benefits office for the whole world,” said Kjaersgaard in 1993. “Denmark can’t be the benefits office for the whole world,” said Fogh Rasmussen in 2003.
Since the Social Democrats were re-elected in 2011, the spotlight has shifted – slightly. The DFP aren’t in the news every week, and Danish debate is preoccupied with the financial crisis.
Meanwhile, the government has thrown immigrants a few olive branches. Immigrants who want to marry a foreigner now have to have lived in Denmark for only 26 years, rather than 28. In a symbolic move, the Ministry of Integration has folded and been incorporated into other departments. The notorious points system has been repealed – though, like the closure of the integration ministry, this change is largely cosmetic. Points or not, Denmark’s immigration rules are still almost as strict as they were before. In fact, though they’ve hit the pause button on the xenophobic rhetoric, the Social Democrats haven’t exactly rewound everything either. Nyrup Rasmussen may have once called the DFP “indecent” – but a decade on, his Social Democrat successors aren’t doing a great deal to revoke their policies. “It’s not so easy for them though,” argues Alev. “Even among the supporters of the Social Democrats there are a lot of people who could potentially shift to the Dansk Folkeparti.”
Outside of politics, xenophobia still regularly rears its head in Danish public life. In April 2012, a regional newspaper reported that “Neger stjal bil fra 80-arig” – or “Negro stole car from 80-year-old.” It was a conscious choice, the editor argued. “I do not think it is an offensive word,” he said. “If he had been a red-head, I would have written that. If he had been bald, I would have written that.”
A month later, it emerged that the Danish Film Institute had rejected a producer’s funding application because, among other reasons, “Films featuring cast members with another ethnic background haven’t shown to be especially sellable in the provinces.”
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From the outside, Fatih Alev’s mosque doesn’t really look like a place of worship. On a housing estate in Nørrebro, and three floors up a tower-block caked in graffiti, the Danish Islamic Centre is actually a four-bedroom flat that has been hastily converted into a makeshift prayer centre. When I sit in on Friday prayers one week, it’s easy to see why many Muslims feel so isolated. Their places of worship are all a bit like this. Unlike the Danish Church, which receives public funding through tax revenues, minority religions get no help from the state – and as a result there is only one purpose-built mosque in Denmark. And the sense of isolation that this causes is exacerbated by the reluctance of politicians to visit those temporary sites that do exist.
“In many other European countries, government officials don’t have a problem with visiting a mosque in times of crisis or during an important religious festival,” says Alev. “This is very important – it helps the Muslim society to feel at home and included, to see that they are being officially recognised in the society. But you don’t see this in Denmark. You don’t see it because the government representatives don’t want to be seen in the company of someone who may be, later on, portrayed as an extremist, as a radical person who said this and that and so forth.”
At Friday prayers, I meet a 22-year-old man called Wasim. He is keen to talk about what it feels like to be a young Muslim in Denmark, so we later have a coffee at Copenhagen University, where he studies sociology. As soon as we sit down, Wasim cuts to the chase.
“I was born here,” he says, “but I don’t feel like a Dane.”
Why not? I ask.
“Look at the political system,” he replies – and he’s off. “For the last ten years, they have been against us. Every time. We are only seven to ten per cent of the population, and yet every time you look at the news it’s about us. Of course, there are a few who make trouble, but they are a small part. Look at this university. There are so many Asian students. But they never talk about us. I don’t think I’ve really read about a foreigner, like me, who’s doing well in education. A few days ago I read about a foreigner who was doing well in business, and the time before that was a long time ago. Why is it like that? We have so many successful stories. But we only read about the bad sides of the foreigners.”
Wasim is against forced marriage and the burqa, but he felt stigmatised by the laws that tried to ban them. He felt they were just a smokescreen for making immigrants feel even more unwelcome. The final straw came at 18 – when, having lived in Denmark all his life, he had to apply for permanent residency, a stepping stone towards full citizenship.
“I was born here but because my parents were not Danish, I couldn’t get citizenship by birth,” he explains. “So when I was 18, I had to prove that I was Danish – even though I was born in Denmark, lived here all my life and got my education in Denmark, just like any other Dane.” He raises his voice. “And when I applied, I had to wait six fucking months – sorry for my language – even though I was born here. The son of an EU citizen would only have to wait one month. Are we not the same? Things like this made me realise that it’s not my country any more.”
He calms down. “Sorry to get angry, but I hate this law. It’s like I’m from another world. It’s like I’m not even human. That’s why I don’t feel like a Dane. Struggle is a big word, but I had an identity struggle. I gave up about half a year ago. I just realised that I’m a Pakistani in this country. I’m a foreigner.”
Wasim speaks wistfully about his cous
ins in the UK, who he says don’t have this problem. “They call themselves British Muslims. And they’re the same age as me, and born in Britain. How can that difference happen?” He makes it clear that he’s not angry at ordinary Danes, just the people at the top. “I love the Danes,” he says, “and I love Denmark. There is a good welfare state. If you’re out of work, you get benefits. There’s free education, free medical care. But for me, I don’t feel accepted by the politicians. I want acceptance of my identity.”
Wasim claims that his complaint is common among many other cosmopolitan “New Danes”, or Danes of foreign origin. “There are many, many foreigners who tell me: ‘Wasim, this is not my country.’ They’re well-educated, from Danish universities, and they’re saying, ‘Well, okay, if they don’t accept me, I have a Master’s, I can get a job somewhere else.’ ”
Wasim constantly mentions how many Muslims he knows at university, and how employable they are. This is refreshing, because a stereotypically bigoted criticism of immigrants in Denmark is that they are uneducated and work-shy. It’s true – the stats aren’t great. As noted in the previous chapter, only 52% of foreign-born men and 43% of foreign-born women were in work in 2011, around 20 percentage points below their Danish-born counterparts. Before the financial crisis, immigrants’ net contribution to the welfare state had almost reached parity, but this has since dropped again. As a result, there is a perception that Denmark and its glorious welfare state can only work as a monoculture unsoiled by outsiders.
This isn’t particularly fair, says Michala Clante Bendixen, a campaigner for immigrant rights and a board member of the charity Refugees Underground. “We consider the welfare system to be perfect, and that if anyone wants to join it, it’s their problem to get into it,” argues Bendixen. “They have to find their own way, and if they don’t succeed, it’s their fault. They’re not doing it well enough. They’re lazy. But we’re not looking at integration as a two-way system where we also have to open up to get new people into the system. We just say ‘they should do more to integrate’. If you don’t speak the language perfectly, if you don’t have the connections, the experience, the education – you’re left out.
“Danish society has actually done very little to try to find out what the problem is. Why is it difficult for immigrants to enter the labour market? How can we help them to enter the labour market? Can we give them the resources to work, instead of hitting them on the head and saying, ‘You don’t want to work’? Can we prepare the work market better? Maybe it’s not absolutely necessary to speak fluent Danish in order to have certain positions within a company.”
Part of the problem is that some immigrants don’t have the grades to get into university, and so can’t find employment within Denmark’s highly skilled jobs market. One answer is to change the way applicants are assessed – so that they’re judged on potential, rather than just exam results. Another left-field option comes from Nille Juul-Sørensen, head of the Danish Design Institute, who wants the government to help young New Danes to set up businesses. “Many are top-notch students, but many are not the guys who go through academia,” he argues. “But they’re really good at trading. You want good vegetables, go to Nørrebro. This is actually a golden pot for entrepreneurs. So why don’t we take their kids and say: ‘We believe in you, we believe you can do the start-ups, it’s in your culture.’ If they don’t want to do maths, can we help them set up a company selling music?”
Alev is hopeful that things will change. “There’s a development, a process going on. Look at the professions young people [of foreign ancestry] are taking. They’re not just studying medicine or engineering – they are more and more confident. They’re studying archaeology, anthropology. People say that immigration has destroyed the fundaments of our welfare society, but these immigrants are going to boost up the Danish economy and we’ll be better funded than ever. It’ll be very entertaining to read all of these [xenophobic] statements 20 years from now.”
In Denmark, the average women’s wage is much lower than the men’s one, but it is still a great source of Danish pride that there are almost as many women in work as men. However, as we have seen, the percentage of foreign-born women in work (43) is much lower than the overall figure for women (70) – which leads some Danes to conclude that immigrant communities are misogynist and therefore unsuited to participating in the welfare state, which relies on as many people paying tax as possible.
“We expect foreign women who come here to work – and I think that’s a good idea,” says Bendixen. “But you can’t expect them to do it [immediately] because it’s not natural for them like it’s natural for us… If you asked the women, they would very much like to work. That’s what we hear all the time. They would love to have a job, and they envy the Danish women for being able to make their own money. So it’s not because they don’t want to – it’s because they don’t have the resources or the background to do it. So we should try to educate these women and cooperate with the work market to create jobs for these women without an education.”
Alev thinks that some immigrants do have simplistic views when it comes to the role of women of society. But he argues that this is a social problem, not a racial or religious one – and that it’s become less of an issue over time. Yes, he says: some immigrants who come from remote rural areas of the Arab and Asian world are stuck in a time warp. But after they’ve been in Denmark for a while, they start to change their tune.
“The integration debate in Denmark has been very much based on religious and ethnic differences,” agrees Clante Bendixen. “But every time you look at a research report, you find that these are social problems, not ethnic ones. Young boys starting fires aren’t doing that because it’s in their ethnic tradition. It’s because they’re poor and unemployed and stacked together in areas where only foreigners and poor people live.”
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In City Hall Square, in the middle of Copenhagen, 500 protesters are holding a rally. They’re a more diverse bunch than most crowds in Denmark. Some are black, some Kurdish, others Arab, and the rest are white Danes. Hoisted above their heads is a banner that reads: “We want to live.” These are refugees – or at least most of them are – and they are protesting at their treatment by the Danish authorities, and at the way they are often perceived as either benefit-scroungers or criminals. There are around 4500 refugees in Denmark, and while their case is being considered, nearly all of them must live in camps far removed from mainstream Danish life. To illustrate their isolation, the protesters have today marched from a camp 16 kilometres outside Copenhagen.
Zach is one of the refugees. He came to Denmark from Kenya last August, fearing for his life for reasons he does not want me to print. He is still waiting to find out if he can stay – and in the meantime he has had plenty of time to contemplate the problems with the Danish asylum system.
The camps are the most obvious problem, he says. The rooms are cramped – many stuffed with up to four people – and researchers from the University of Copenhagen think they spark mental problems in children. They’re also very isolated. At Zach’s camp in rural Auderod, the refugees live five kilometres from the nearest station, which is itself one and a half hours from the nearest city, Copenhagen. The ticket costs 108 kroner – unaffordable for refugees, who receive only 50 kroner a day (around £6) in pocket money. Zach would gladly work to earn more money – but, like all refugees, he’s not allowed. And as he’s over 23, he doesn’t even get free Danish lessons. “You’re in a country where you don’t speak the language,” says Zach, “and you don’t have the opportunity to learn it.” To get any kind of Danish tuition, he must make a journey he can’t afford, to a charity-cum-safespace for refugees in Copenhagen called Trampoline House.
Not everyone has this experience. At a refugee centre in Holbaek, Mohammed – an Afghan who was granted asylum very quickly – is full of praise for the system. In Ringkøbing, in west Jutland, I meet a Bosnian Muslim called Damir Zvirkic who fled a massacre in 19
93 and was part of a group apparently granted asylum after a personal intervention from Margrethe, the Danish queen. Zvirkic feels Danish now, even when he goes back to Bosnia on holiday. “I miss my old country,” he says. “But when we’re at the end of our holiday, and I say to my children: ‘we have to go home’ – I’m talking about Denmark. And when you start to call Denmark your home, that’s a sign.”
But for Zach, the asylum process remains one of trauma. “There is always a fear that tomorrow they will send you a letter saying that you will be deported to the same country you have left. You never know when that is happening. At the end of the process, whether or not you get asylum, your life has changed. You’ve been living in the camp for one, two, three, four, five years. Every night you are woken up by people screaming. You are surrounded by people who often cannot communicate with you. You can’t go to school. You can’t work. Your life is very limited.”
Denmark is not alone. Many countries – not least Britain – haven’t properly worked out how to come to terms with immigration. And unlike much of western Europe, Denmark doesn’t have much of a colonial past, and so has had less time than most to come to terms with the concept of multi-culturalism. But the country definitely has a problem. “It’s like being Danish is something that you’re born into,” says Bendixen. “So what can you do if you come as a foreigner? How can you solve that? If you don’t look like a Dane, and your name is not a traditional Danish one, then it’s not enough, even if you were born here. You’ll never become a real Dane.”